HIGHER? LOWER? NON-EXISTENT? WHEREVER YOUR SEX DRIVE FALLS CURRENTLY, IT MAY CHANGE AGAIN DEPENDING ON WHO YOU’RE WITH, HOW OLD YOU ARE AND WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON. GEORGIA GREEN DIGS DEEPER…
How often do you and your partner agree on what to have for dinner? Maybe they had a big lunch and just want a salad, while you’ve had a stressful day and are craving a comforting bowl of your favourite pasta. Or perhaps you’re heading out for dinner but one of you is hankering for sushi while the other wants a burger.
Sound familiar? However annoying, we accept that it’s rare to be on the same page as another person when it comes to decisions such as what to eat. Yet we don’t afford this same outlook to libido, or sexual desire, despite a mismatch being just as common.
‘Discrepancies in desire between us and the person we are in a sexual relationship with are so common it should be considered the norm rather than exception,’ explains clinical psychologist and psychosexologist Dr Karen Gurney. Indeed, a 2015 study found that up to 80% of couples regularly experience a desire discrepancy in their relationships.
Not only is libido imbalance in couples far more common than we might think, but our understanding around sex drive is often far from accurate, too.
Many of us think of libido as a fixed, innate thing that comes from within us, but the experts say this isn’t true, and that libido can change frequently and quickly. There are myriad psychological reasons, such as feeling stressed, lacking sleep and not feeling connected in our relationships, and physical reasons, including medication and hormonal changes, from pregnancy to menopause.
‘Libido naturally fluctuates throughout your lifetime and is completely context dependent,’ says clinical psychologist and relationship and psychosexual therapist Dr Amani Zarroug. When a person says, ‘I have high libido,’ what they mean is they think it is high comparedwith what they perceive as a ‘normal’ or ‘average’ libido from cultural references, porn and friends. But ‘normal’ doesn’t actually exist. ‘In my work, I talk about sexual desire rather than libido or sex drive, as thinking about sex in these terms causes disappointment when our interest in sex wanes or disappears,’ says Dr Gurney. ‘It makes us feel there is a problem’ with us when there likely isn’t.’
When we embrace the fact that our libidos are ever-changing, we open up a world of possibilities about the kind of sex lives we can have.
The gender stereotype
It’s often assumed that biological females have lower libidos than biological males – but how accurate is that belief? Global research conducted by Headspace
